Syria's Internet Is Offline Again

By Connor Simpson

May 15, 2013

For the second time in as many weeks, the Internet usage in Syria disappeared mysteriously around 10 a.m. local time Wednesday with little to no warning. So, is it another case of the Assad regime trying to disrupt rebel communications or are they really having technical difficulties?

There were some early reports from Akamai that the Internet had once again disappeared. "Syria Internet is offline again, following last week's 19-hour outage," they reported. And Google's Transparency reportseems to confirm as much.

That sharp drop at the end there, and the following flatline, that's the internet going out for the whole country. The Renesys Corporation seems to be running point on the explanations, though. "BGP [border gateway patrol] down, inbound traceroutes failing, nameservers and gov websites down," they said. One of their employees seems to think the Internet outage could last for a few hours because the regime istrying to black out news of the U.N.'s impending decision.